This is a continuation of my report on my “out of box experience” with the Dell T7910.
Diagnostics run, and there have been no BSODs on the replacement T7910.
I’ve been adding apps, mostly using the Remote Desktop Connection from a machine with 4K monitor. That is not as great as it is with a lower-res monitor, since the text on the window to the new workstation is very small.
I figured that, now that I have some confidence in the new machine, I should swap out the disk drives. I ordered the computer with 3 1 TB drives installed, attached to the Dell RAID controller, which they call a PERC, and configured as just a bunch of disks (JBOD). I swapped the drives for 3 8 TB enterprise class Helium drives. There were no rools required. It was a little tricky to get the fron panel off, since Dell ships the system with the fron panel locked. But popping off the left side panel exposed a switch to unlock it. Makes me wonder what good it would do to lock the panel. I guess if the system were installed in a rack it would help.
I powered the system up, fired up the windows disk manager, and it couldn’t see the drives. I did a rescan. Nothing. My guess was that the PERC, not recognizing the three new drives, has taken them out of service, and that I would have to go into the PERC BIOS and tell it that they were a new JBOD set.
But I couldn’t figure out how to get into the PERC BIOS. What’s the right key incantation? I searched in vain for PERC documentation.
So I set up a chat session with Dell support. Turns out the magic key combo is Ctrl-R. R for RAID, easy to remember, right? Not if you only have to use it every couple of years.
I should back up and mention that at no time in my use fo this or the previous T7910 has I seen the RAID controller splash screen, the one that usually tells you how to get into its BIOS. Undaunted, I just kept tapping Cyrl-R all through the boot process. Nothing but Windows.
I checked the Device Manager, which had previously shown that the PERC, which is made by Avago and is not identified as such in any Dell documentation that I’ve seen, still was there and indicated no problems.
I looked for a Windows app to configure the RAID controller. Nothing on my system.
The tech sent me a link to the Avago documentation. It used to be that Dell provided PERC documentation. No more. It said plainly that there should be a Avago BIOS splash screen with a copyright notice and the Ctrl-R key combo called out.
The Dell tech sent me a link to a Windows GUI for the RAID controller. I installed it. Or thought I did; it installed the C runtime library and quit, apparently satisfied. But I couldn’t find the app. I ran the installer again, and this time it installed the GUI.
I fired it up. It saw the drives:
I found the link to create virtual drives:
I clicked on it. Nothing.
I messed around for about 10 minutes in frustration. Finally, I clicked on the above link again. Success.
Turns out the JBOD is not a supported option, so I configured each drive as a 8TB, one-disk, RAID 0. Works for me.
Now to move my data and images. I will say this for Win 10; It makes assigning drives to documents and images much easier than before.
Should I worry that I can’t get in to the PERC BIOS? Maybe, but not now.
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